


Some Dance to Forget

by phoebesmum



Category: Sports Night
Genre: Angst, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-23
Updated: 2009-11-23
Packaged: 2017-10-03 15:27:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phoebesmum/pseuds/phoebesmum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Rootless, he need never fear to be uprooted again.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Some Dance to Forget

**Author's Note:**

> Written December 2006: for Ivy, on her birthday. (Not the most cheerful of birthday fics, I'll admit. Sorry, Ivy.)

Wherever Dan goes now, he's haunted by executive artwork.

He's a travellin' man, just him, some hand luggage, his laptop and his iPod. He's left his friends behind, and his family's scattered to the four winds; he doesn't even know what country his father's in any more, and David has never been much more than a voice on the phone, not since they were kids. Apart from the occasional professional obligation – a deadline here, a signing there – he's achieved perfect independence: no-one to hassle him, no-one on his back, no-one to answer to.

Sounds wonderful. Isn't that what he's always wanted? What everyone wants? Time, and space, and total, absolute, untrammelled freedom?

But freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. Everybody's got a hungry heart. And you'll never be going back home.

(Perhaps he spends a little too much time with his iPod, since he seems to have taken to thinking in song lyrics, which doesn't bode well for the freshness and originality – he has been credited, to his startlement, with both these things – of his next novel. But he'll jump that bridge when he comes to it, and hope the leap doesn't leave him clinging by his fingernails to a crumbling shale bank of stale and misused metaphor … like that one. Or, if it does, that his hard-working editor knows more about fair use than he does.)

He's grown accustomed to living out of a suitcase. He's resigned to the fact that the bed will be uncomfortable, the room service menu bland and predictable, the closet space inadequate, the workspace cramped and the internet connection uncertain; that the laundry will always lose at least a sock and, more often than not, his boxers too. The 'sanitised for your protection!' strip around the lavatory has long since ceased to amuse, and the complimentary toiletries are only tempting on the rare occasions that they're supplied by _L'Occitane_. He travels with his own pillow. It seems precious, an affectation, but it's not; its orthopaedic design supports his neck, assures him a good night's rest, saves him from waking in too much pain. There's always some residue, a few aches and cricks, by-products of ageing. He's 35 now, and can no longer call himself young, any more than he can deny that he no longer _needs_ more than a few drops of the complimentary shampoos. (Other aches, other pains? Sharper, harder to pinpoint; easier to name.)

But there's just this one thing. Every hotel room has a couple of pictures hanging on – actually, generally nailed to – the walls. And every place he stays, they seem to be worse than the last. He can live with ugly drapes, hideous wallpaper, he can even, sometimes, be amused by them, but the artwork … right from day one, it started to get to him. Always so safe, so soulless, so carefully designed not to disturb, distress, displease. Nothing challenging, nothing that might be offensive, just flower prints and pastels, landscapes, Van Gogh's eternal _Sunflowers_, and if he ever sees _The Singing_ fucking _Butler_ again, he's going to punch a fist straight through the frame.

To avoid any danger of this, he also carries with him, rolled in a tube, a Hopper print and a copy of the poster for _Raging Bull_. The first thing he does, after he lets himself into a new room and drops his bags on the bed, is take these out and Blu-Tack them over whatever creative nonentity the hotel has chosen to grace the décor.

It's funny, really, because Dan would never have listed 'art' high on the list of his priorities. He's toured enough galleries in his time, knows enough to talk a good talk, impress susceptible women (so long as the susceptible women don't know more than he does), but he's no connoisseur. His mom was the expert; what she didn't know about art wasn't worth knowing. But her collection was auctioned off when the house was sold, the proceeds split among her three surviving children, none of whom now need ever work again, and Dan finds he can't even remember half of what she used to own. Sometimes a painting familiar from his childhood will show up in a catalogue and he'll think _'Oh!_' with a little shock of recognition, but, for the most part, that fragment of his memory is a sealed unit.

He lies back on the latest bed, Queen-sized, double-sprung, a faux-marble headboard that glows faintly in the darkness all night long and must have concussed many an unwary or less-than-sober guest, and contemplates the walls.

_Nighthawks_. It reminds him of New York: of late-night bars, smoky and dim (before the new city ordinances changed everything, before everything changed), of off-key pianos, the sour taste of whisky in his throat, of Tom Waits's world-weary drawl, of drunk, slutty, easy girls, and drunker, sluttier, easier boys. Of beautiful, unattainable men. Of good times, good, good times, gone, never to come again.

And the _Raging Bull_, of course. They'd hung that in their office the first day they came to work at _Sports Night_, Casey and he. Not this print: the one they'd had in New York had covered half the wall. He doesn't know what became of it.

Good times. Good, good times. Gone. Never to come again.

_I guess every form of refuge has its price_, his iPod wails plaintively into his ears, and he wonders for the millionth time how this AOR crap found its way into his collection – he must've copied it in a fugue state, or a moment of extreme and crippling weakness – and why in the world he hasn't deleted it yet. Truthfully, he knows why. It's because sometimes he needs blandness, easy listening, gentle, undemanding melodies and simple, banal lyrics that don't require thought. And by _sometimes_ he means, nowadays, more and more. The rawness and grit of the blues artists, the jazz greats, the runaway American dreamers so beloved of his youth; it's too much for him now. Now he needs to be calmed, soothed, tranquillised into a state that almost approximates peace.

Maybe the artwork, the gutless, trite, anodyne artwork, is somehow seeping into his brain in spite of all his efforts.

And these hotel rooms, this vagrant life he's living? It's a refuge: that's for sure. Rootless, he need never fear to be uprooted again.

But late at night, the big old house does get so fucking lonely.

_You can't hide your lyin' eyes_, Glenn Frey … whines, there's no other word for it, and Dan closes his own eyes, which is a mistake. Now all he can see is another pair of eyes, once as familiar to him as his own (more so; how often do you look into your own eyes?): warm, and brown, and deceptively candid. Lying eyes, indeed.

Except, no, not so much. Casey wasn't the one to blame. It was him, Dan, bone-headed and thick-witted as usual, running with scissors, pining for the moon, jumping to conclusions and fucking things up, the way he always had done. Casey had never said a word to make Dan think he felt any more toward him than simple, straightforward, male-bonding, good-buddy friendship. Not ever a word.

Oh, looks, smiles, glances, little, sly hints; touches, all those touches, to his arm, the small of his back, the nape of his neck, places guys don't usually touch, if they touch at all. Those, there had been. But they'd meant nothing. Had they?

They had. Meant nothing. He'd learned that the hard way. Years, it had been, of schooling himself not to react to those touches, to remain impassive, unresponsive. _Lisa_, he'd used to remind himself. That one word had usually been enough to do it. But Lisa had come (or, from what Dan knew of her … more probably not) and gone, other women had replaced her, but never for long, while the looks and the touches had never changed. Casey had been his universal constant, his lodestar, his Holy Grail, his ivory tower.

He'd been a fool, allowed himself hope, and hope had punched him in the gut, all the dreams he'd let himself have (never let himself have) had come tumbling down, hit the floor so hard he would've seen stars if the stars hadn't been shattered and snatched away and lost to him. Polarity had shifted, the Holy Grail become a battered tin cup, the ivory tower a mirage. The universe had not, he had found out too late, been constant at all.

Why does he still think about this stuff? It was years ago. Years since he left _Sports Night_, left New York, headed out west and made a new life for himself. Years since his first bestseller, years since the literary world ceased to be amazed that a sports anchor could string together two coherent words (what did they think he'd been doing all his working life, did they think scripts just _happened?_) and stopped treating him as an overnight sensation, a one-hit wonder. He's a Great American Novelist now, lionised and fêted wherever he goes, wherever people read (and people do still read, falling literacy levels be damned). He writes, he publishes, he travels, he lectures, he signs; when he returns to TV now, he answers questions where once he would have asked them. It makes him feel like a guest, an outsider in the house he grew up in, flitting through the refurbished halls like a living ghost. He's notoriously hard to book for television. His agent has threatened to kill him if he doesn't answer her calls.

Notwithstanding that, he hasn't exactly gone into hiding. If Casey had ever wanted to find him, all he had to do was look.

Casey's never come looking.

He'd thought it would be an adventure, this travelling, this roaming gypsy lifestyle, He'd thought it would be fun. And, sometimes – often – it is; when he drives into a new town, when he heads out to see the sights, hit the bars and clubs, meet the people, surrounding himself with newness and change and difference, drinking in life through others' lives, storing it all up in the repository of his mind to be recycled in due course as words, words, and more words. When he's signing, basking in the limelight that he hadn't realised he would miss so much, watching serious young men and lovestruck young women (sometimes vice versa) hang on every word he speaks as though he came bearing stone tablets. _Don't listen to me_, he sometimes wants to tell them, _what do I know? I'm a fake, a fraud. This, what you can see – this is all there is of me; there's nothing behind it, I'm an empty shell, a false façade, I'm the great and powerful Oz hiding behind his little curtain. Don't believe in me!_ Then they pass him their books to sign, and gaze at him with wide, candid eyes, and he pastes on his show face with the ease of long practice and says, simply, "Who shall I sign it to?"

Those are the days. It's the nights, when he comes back alone, lets himself into a blank, anonymous room in which everything is the same but nothing is familiar – it's the nights that leave him wakeful, lost, disenfranchised, displaced. The nights, when all he has to tie him to his past are two flimsy sheets of paper and his memories; when he reaches out for the phone and half-dials a number that he can never forget.

He reaches out now, and dials. Not that number. Room service. He's hungry, he would kill for coffee, and he doesn't want to go out and face the world. He sends down an order, and waits.

The knock on the door comes sooner than he'd expected. He doesn't know whether to admire the kitchen's efficiency, or fear the probability of microwaved food. Whatever. He grabs his wallet off the nightstand, swings himself off the bed, crosses the room and unlocks the door.

Sometimes when he does this, he lets himself daydream. Daydream, like a fool, like a kid. A stupid kid. Doesn't he know, hasn't he learned where dreaming gets you? But, nonetheless: he imagines:

_He opens the door._

_"Hey," he begins, and flashes his professional smile, artless and charming, for what he hopes will be the last time that day. "Thanks. Can you – " and then, "Oh!"_

_This isn't room service. He would never have dared to have asked for this._

_But it's here. He doesn't ask how or why; doesn't say anything. Just reaches out a hand, to touch (is this real?), to hold (don't let it slip away!); his fingers tangle in soft, fleecy cotton. He looks at his hand. His knuckles are white._

He looks at his hand. His knuckles are white.

He opens the door. "Come in," he says, and, "Put it over there," and "Thanks!" and "There you go". Shuts the door again; leans against it.

Just him tonight, then. Just him, and Jake, and the nighthawks.

He chose this refuge. He pays the price.

* * *


End file.
